Core Concepts

An Excel Table is a suite of tools applied to a range of data, generally with a title row, that supports formatting, filtering, adding, deleting, charting and summarizing.

Pivot Tablesallow you to extract answers to a series of basic questions about your data with minimal effort, allowing you to summarize large quantities of data quickly and easily.

Pivot tablesare used to summarize, sort, reorganize, group, count, total or average data stored in a database.

Data analysis relies on logic and tools to extract relationships and meaning from sets of data.

It is performed to find useful information to form the insights and conclusions needed for superior decision-making.

There are a large number and variety of advanced data analysis tools as required by volume, processing or replicability.

However, the majority of data analysis by Financial Analysts is performed using Excel, including Tables and PivotTables, an integrated suite of functionality.

As the name suggests, the objective of Trend Analysis is to identify 'trends', or a pattern of behavior over time.

It can be utilized to put the behavior of a company in the context of its own historic behavior or in the context of its peers universe historic behavior.

There are a significant number of 'data integrity' issues with all data sets, including those of public company financial data.

There are no easy solutions. Financial analysts must be sensitive to these issues and apply common sense judgment in your analysis.